Certainly there is not a rational person who believes alleged illegal action dispersed among the president’s campaign team is less significant than cartoon cheese.

Thigh-High Politics is an op-ed column by Teen Vogue writer Lauren Duca that breaks down the news, provides resources for the resistance, and just generally refuses to accept toxic nonsense.

Few displays of Fox News propaganda have been as egregious as the cheeseburger incident on Monday, October 30.

It was a huge news day, with game-changing developments in the ongoing investigation by special prosecutor Robert Mueller into the Trump campaign’s potential ties to Russia. That morning, major news outlets like CNN and MSNBC reported that Mueller had indicted the president’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and his deputy Rick Gates. The special counsel's office also released documents revealing that earlier in the month it received a guilty plea from former foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, who admitted to lying to the FBI about "his interactions with a certain foreign contact who discussed 'dirt' related to emails" concerning Hillary Clinton, according to CNN.

As developments unfolded on its competitors's screens, Fox and Friends briefly mentioned the news, but failed to provide any accompanying reporting or commentary, and quickly moved on to a minutes-long dialogue about the differing placement of cheese on burger emojis released by Google and Apple.

A history-shifting moment was breaking in real time, and there was Fox, committed to a deep dive into the nuance of the virtual-beef-patty stacking hierarchy. It came just after a spot on millennials getting too enthusiastic about Halloween and before a piece announcing the breaking discovery that Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are the most desired holiday candy.

“We’ve been talking about this all morning,” says host Jillian Mele, introducing the emoji segment. “Can you see what’s wrong with this picture? The cheese is underneath the hamburger! Who does that?”

Mele then proceeded to read a letter from a viewer. “Rhonda writes: I worked at a restaurant in my younger days and we were taught to put the lettuce under the burger to keep the bun from getting soggy.”

“Way to get to the bottom of that, Jillian,” Brian Kilmeade said from the couch.

Certainly there is not a rational person who believes alleged illegal action dispersed among the president’s campaign team is less significant than cartoon cheese. For an outlet that serves an estimated 1.42 million viewers per day, ignoring the news about Papadopoulos, Manafort, and Gates was an unabashed attempt to protect the reputation of the Trump administration, by denying its audience any significant coverage.

The sheer garishness of Fox’s bias is often written off as a cultural punchline, but it is also extremely harmful to huge swaths of the American electorate. Viewers are actively being brainwashed by propaganda masquerading as a serious source of news, frequently endorsed by the president’s Twitter account. Fox presents itself as a “fair and balanced” network, but it fails to report news from the White House without obvious bias. Consider Lou Dobbs’s recent interview with Trump: In about 10 minutes of conversation, he failed to press the president on issues throughout his tenure, instead complimenting him by saying, “You have accomplished so much in that nine months.”

I’ve had more challenging exchanges with childhood toys animated by the sound of my own voice. Dobbs’s puff pastry of sycophancy wasn’t even pretending to be journalism. With rare exception, this is largely true of the network in general.

Fox News began in 1996 as an effort to create a conservative information machine. Late chairman and CEO Roger Ailes came from a mix of entertainment and politics, working for Richard Nixon in his presidential race to make serious use of television for campaigning. As Gabriel Sherman documents extensively in his book, The Loudest Voice in the Room, Ailes used the network to generate narratives of rage and fear from the early days at Fox. In recent years, the network’s coverage can be best described as far-right fan fiction, marked by ongoing stories about the supposed “War on Christmas,” the suggestion that rape doesn’t happen on college campuses, or that story about Obama blowing off the prime minister of Israel in favor of meeting with a man dressed up like a pirate.

There are times when these narratives appear to be spun from whole cloth, though they’re usually grown out of something loosely resembling a nugget of truth. Most often, the Fox News formula involves the stretch of an obscure, local news story into the national conversation, followed by a dousing of reckless speculation engineered to generate paranoia. Often, the network sets itself up as a victim, fear-mongering against all of those who exist in its out-group — like minorities, especially Muslims, and, of course, the so-called liberal elite. A recent report focused on a female-only hour of swimming for Muslim girls at a Minneapolis YMCA, which the network presented as evidence of Sharia law.

Fox also hawks its brand of designer paranoia in place of any news of consequence for the White House. Much like with the cheeseburger “story,” when news broke on May 25 that Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had become a focus of the Russia investigation, CNN and MSNBC presented and unpacked the story, while Tucker Carlson did an 8 p.m. report on some of my dumbass tweets, which he cited as a sign of aggression among progressives. The segment was titled, “Violent Left Turn.”

Fox’s dissemination of propaganda has dire consequences for the health of our democracy, the foundation of which is an informed citizenry. A 2010 study from a Stanford University political scientist found that watching Fox News made viewers less likely to accept scientific statements on global warming. That same year, researchers at Ohio State University released a report saying, “People who use Fox News believe more of the rumors we asked about and they believe them more strongly than those who do not.” And a 2012 study by the Poynter Institute found that Fox News viewers were more likely to be uninformed than if they had watched nothing whatsoever.

Read that sentence again. Literally banging rocks onto other rocks would be a more productive way of understanding the day’s news.

It is notable that one such misled audience member is reported to sit around in his bathrobe, watching Fox News and tweeting in support of its stream of disinformation from his bedroom at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But this issue is less about where Trump gets his news and more about the harm that the president’s favorite network is doing to the American people. The purpose of journalism is to speak truth to power by arming citizens with information. Fox is doing precisely the opposite. That said, in the interest of objectivity, I’m willing to concede that the cheese goes on top.